


We'll Be Okay

by iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid



Category: iZombie (TV)
Genre: Episode: Looking for Mr. Goodbrain Pt 2, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Post Season 03 Finale, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 15:16:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11382834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid/pseuds/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid
Summary: Her voice becomes background noise as he zones out. Normally he would feel bad about that, but it’s not intentional. Somehow he just has trouble focusing on what she’s saying. Something about symptoms and stomach issues and being hungry.He’s not hungry, though. Just tired.





	We'll Be Okay

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my take on what happens after THAT scene, the scene that killed me and I haven't stopped gushing about for like, a straight week. I love these two. So much. So so much.

“Don’t be a dick.”

Ravi can’t help it. He laughs.

Liv doesn’t seem to share in his amusement. Her hand is cold on his wrist—which means _he_ must still be warm, definitely a good sign—and her other hand still clings to his forearm, thumb gently grazing his skin just beside the scratch.

“How do you feel?”

“Alright, I suppose,” he answers through a yawn. And it’s true. His arm stings a bit. He’s also still exhausted from the hours upon hours he spent working on the vaccine, and that exhaustion is setting in a little more heavily now. But he’s alright. “Really, Liv.”

She doesn’t quite roll her eyes at him, just raises her eyebrows in a way that clearly says she doesn’t believe him. Her grip changes on his wrist, feeling for his pulse. She hums and says, “I should have checked before scratching you, I have no idea whether this is faster or slower than it was. You’re at about 90 now but I’ll keep…”

Her voice becomes background noise as he zones out. Normally he would feel bad about that, but it’s not intentional. Somehow he just has trouble focusing on what she’s saying. Something about symptoms and stomach issues and being hungry.

He’s not hungry, though. Just tired.

As that thought crosses his mind he finds himself swaying to his right, very nearly falling over, and Liv’s sudden shout of his name jerks him back into wakefulness.

“What? What is it?” he asks incredulously.

Her eyes are wide and she’s got one hand on each of his upper arms, like if he falls over she’ll be able to catch him—wait, no, he reminds himself. Not _as if_ she could catch him. It’s still so easy to forget what she can do, being as tiny as she is.

“Ravi, you just almost collapsed right in front of me,” she says.

“Liv, I’m fine,” he insists, though he even hears how unconvincing he sounds. He presses on, “It’s like you said, I haven’t… haven’t slept much. I’m…”

But he doesn’t finish his sentence, because at that exact moment the whole room spins dizzyingly fast around him and he _does_ collapse, falls straight forward as his vision goes black. 

* * *

 

There is an awful stiffness in his back when he starts to come to, like he’s been asleep for ages in an awkward position. Something on his right arm stings, and his stomach has the sort of queasiness that is best not thought about for too long or he might be liable to vomit, but at least there’s something wonderfully cool on his forehead. He wants to lean into it but doesn’t quite have it in him to move just yet; whatever it is, it’s dispelling the heat in a way that sends him back to when he was ten and sick with the flu with a cold compress on his head—

And of course, just as he thinks that, whatever had been cooling his forehead lifts away. He can’t help the annoyed little groan he lets out. His brow furrows, and someone gasps.

“Ravi?”

He cringes, shifting uncomfortably and realizing that he _has_ been asleep in an awkward position—lying on his office couch with his head against one armrest and his legs dangling off the edge of the other. His heavy eyelids take a second to open, and even when they do his vision starts off hazy. For a moment all he sees is someone standing over him, their silhouette blocking the harsh fluorescent light from the ceiling.

Their face becomes clearer as his eyes adjust. Bright white hair, worried grey-green eyes.

“... Liv?”

Her mouth is a tight line when she smiles at him, her eyes red-rimmed with tears, and she nods.

“You okay?” he asks.

The instant the words are out of his mouth her expression completely changes, eyes darkening dangerously— _“What?!”_ she shouts—and he shrinks back into the couch with wide eyes. Was that a flash of red in her iris or is he just drowsy?

She visibly reigns in her temper as she pinches the bridge of her nose. “I swear, I would hit you right now if you didn’t look like a stiff breeze would knock you over. Where do you get off asking me if _I’m_ okay when _you’ve_ been unconscious for almost two hours?”

He opens his mouth, but she cuts him off.

“Don’t answer that. Just—” she stops and sighs. Her voice softens. “Let’s move on to the _relevant_ questions, okay? Which is how _you’re_ feeling. Tell me everything.”

“Er… stiff. A bit queasy,” he answers, wincing and trying to push himself upright. Liv watches his every movement like a hawk, but he manages to sit up without her help. The blanket she must have given him falls to the floor. Liv sits down next to him, facing him with her legs crossed on the couch cushion, and he looks down at his newly bandaged forearm. “This still stings, but no more than expected. Thanks for the first aid, Dr. Moore.”

She gives a halfhearted smile at that. She reaches out for his arm, which he willingly offers, and she gently feels for his pulse.

“Well,” she says. “Your pulse is changing every time I check it. It dropped down into the forties while you were out, and then jumped right back up all the way into the _hundreds_ , and now it’s slowing again. 56, not quite zombie-level, but…”

The way her voice trails off makes him uneasy, and he’s almost afraid to ask, “How do I look?”

In lieu of answering Liv chews on her lip as she pulls her phone out of her pocket, quickly bringing the screen to life and opening up her front-facing camera before she hands it to him.

The first thing he notices, with a fearful jolt, is that he looks pale. But upon further inspection he realizes it’s not quite _zombie_ pale, just sick pale—though he can’t be totally sure how zombie-ism would affect his skin, seeing as the only zombies he’s ever met who didn’t prescribe to the Fillmore Graves _tan and dye_ mantra were all much paler than him to begin with. His eyes are a bit of a worry, too, he realizes when he pulls the camera closer. His left eye is exactly as brown as it’s always been, but there’s an unmistakeable bit of color loss happening in the other.

He’ll have to monitor himself pretty extensively to map out his symptom progression—and, hopefully, _hopefully_ , his eventual symptom regression as well _._

When he tries to move the camera around to get a better look at his still-brown hair, Liv quietly says, “I’ve been checking, don’t worry. Not a gray in sight yet.”

 _Yet._ Ravi gives a shaky nod, handing back her phone as he forces himself to take a slow breath. He had sort of jumped right into this, certain that the vaccine would work, stubbornly certain even. He _still_ has every reason to believe it will, and maybe it’s the drowsiness or the queasiness or some side effect of his immune system kicking into high gear, but the fear is just now beginning to set in.

“Did—did you feel like you were going to vomit?” he asks her, staring straight ahead. “When you were turned?”

Liv shakes her head. “No,” she says, her anger seeming to have entirely dissipated by now. Which is good, because he is already quietly berating himself for so recklessly deciding to be his own test subject, and he doesn’t think he could handle her voicing his worries aloud. Instead she adds, “I was just hungry. And cold.”

His hand automatically goes over his stomach, and he chews on the inside of his cheek, thinking. He doesn’t feel cold, that much is true. And he doubts he could eat anything more substantial than a _saltine_ right now without it coming right back up. Any kind of food right about now sounds just as repulsive to him as brains always have—which means he’s definitely ill, but it troublingly blurs the distinction between whether he’s an ill _human_ or an ill _zombie_.

He knows his condition could go one of a million different ways, one of which is true zombie-ism, one of which is staying human, and the rest are a whole host of complications and side effects that have never been seen before and could range from mild sickness to… Well, nothing he wants to think about. He gulps. What if his body rejects both the virus _and_ the vaccine? What if his lungs fill up with liquid like Major’s did? It would be bad enough dying, but he can’t imagine what that would do to Liv—no, wait, he _can_ imagine. He remembers all too well watching Major approach death, knowing it was _his_ makeshift cure that was causing it.

He knows Liv checked his pulse not five minutes ago, but he can already feel it rising again, beating furiously against his chest and making his hands shake.

“Hey,” Liv says, reaching out and turning his face toward her, cutting off his destructive train of thought. He leans into her touch without meaning to do so. “It’s gonna be okay, Ravi.”

He nods and tries to offer her a reassuring smile that, judging by the way she looks at him, just comes off looking sad. It doesn’t escape his notice that they seem to have switched roles, him exuding pessimism and anxiety while she insists that everything will be alright.

He doesn’t think it escapes her notice, either.

“I mean it,” she says as she pulls him into a hug. Ravi instantly sinks into her, letting his shoulders sag and his face drop down onto her shoulder as his arms wind around her middle. “Seriously,” she says as she runs her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. “Even so far, this vaccine is doing something incredible. Without it you’d already be white as a sheet and craving a nice hunk of frontal lobe, but you’re not. We don’t know if you’ve reached billion-dollar medical patent level yet, but you’re definitely at _least_ at a few hundred thousand bucks.”

That at least gets a chuckle out of him, and he tightens his grip on her.

“And this is pretty promising so far. You’re in desperate need of a comb and another couple days of sleep, but your hair is still as dark as ever, your pulse is still safely above forty, and you’re not even a little bit cold. You’re practically a furnace, _which_ you and I both know means your immune system is working hard,” she says, and he realizes that she is at least right about that. Her icy arms around his shoulders and her hand in his hair only feel so _completely_ sublime because he must be feverish.

“The vaccine is… doing something,” he agrees, his voice muffled by her hair, though he elects not to say exactly what the vaccine is doing. That remains to be seen.

“Exactly,” she says, and she hangs on to him a little while longer before slowly pulling away, just enough so that her hands are still on shoulders. She smiles at him. “Now lay back and get some more sleep.”

He shakes his head and says, “I can’t, I have to—”

“What _you_ have to do,” she interrupts with a hand on his chest to stop him from trying to stand, “is rest. You’re not the only doctor here, Chakrabarti. I’ll be right here, monitoring your symptoms, keeping a close eye on you, and I’ll check on the rats and keep the morgue running, too.”

“Liv, there is a _literal_ zombie apocalypse going on right now.”

“Which is not a big deal for a zombie,” she says. “I can handle things for a couple hours while you get your strength back up.”

He frowns. “You’ll wake me if anything happens?”

“Promise,” she says. Part of him suspects she’s lying, but he _is_ still exhausted, so even if she weren’t as unbearably stubborn as he knows she is, he probably wouldn’t have the strength to argue it further.

He lets out a sigh and a reluctant nod. He grabs one of the two throw pillows—a scratchy uncomfortable thing, but at the moment it might as well be the softest down pillow on Earth for how much he cares—and places it against Liv’s thigh, because if she’s forcing him to sleep against his will he is _damn_ well going to be comfortable while he does it. She utters not a single word of complaint as he shifts around and lays his head down practically on her lap; she just smiles and rolls her eyes.

She starts running her fingers through his hair again, and he relaxes. For the first time since waking up he starts to feel like maybe, just maybe, this will work, and maybe he didn’t make the biggest mistake of his life acting as his own guinea pig. And even if it doesn’t work, even if he becomes a zombie, even if something worse than zombie-ism happens… he’s got Liv. He’ll be okay.

They’ll be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> I might add a second one of the same scene from Liv's POV, we'll see how that turns out.


End file.
